Contours of Climate Justice - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

that allow us to deconstruct economic rationality
at the same time as an environmental
rationality is constructed.
Beyond the task of dismantling the dominant
economic model, it is a matter of unravelling
economic rationality while weaving
new matrices of rationality to fertilise
new territories of life. This leads to a strategy
of deconstruction and reconstruction;
not making the system crumble, but reorganising
production and consumption based
on the principles of environmental rationality;
unlinking from the cogs of capitalist
market mechanisms and economic valuation
of environmental goods and services
as the dominating principle that organises
the global economy; incorporating what
would be the waste product into new ecological
cycles through ‘clean technologies’,
as promoted by an emergent geopolitics of
sustainable development (Leff 2002). This
reconstruction, however, is not only guided
by an ‘ecological rationality’, but by cultural
forms and processes of resignifi cation
of nature. In this sense, the construction of
an environmental rationality capable of deconstructing
economic rationality implies
processes of reappropriation of nature and
re-territorialisation of cultures.
Economic growth carries with it the problem
of its measure. The omnipresent measure
of GDP, by which national economies
are evaluated in their success or failure, does
not measure negative externalities. But the
fundamental problem cannot be solved with
a multiple scale or multi-criteria methods,
or with ‘green accounts’, the calculation of
the hidden costs of growth, a ‘human development
index’ or an ‘indicator of genuine
progress’. The point is to defuse the internal
device (the genetic code) of the economy,
and to do it without provoking a recession
of such magnitude that it would bring about
yet more poverty and environmental destruction.
The decolonisation of the imaginary sustaining
the dominant economy will not
emerge from responsible consumption or
a pedagogy of socio-environmental catastrophes,
as Latouche suggested when focusing
on the degrowth wager. Economic
rationality has become institutionalised and
incorporated into our way of being in the
world, homo oeconomicus. What is needed
then is a change of skin. The really-existing
economy cannot be deconstructed by an
ideological reaction or a revolutionary social
movement. It is not enough to moderate
it by incorporating other values and social
imperatives. Deconstruction entails practical
measures, or we will forever stay at the
purely theoretical level, striking blindly in
the dark with our desires for a better and
more sustainable world.
The limit to growth, the
resignifi cation of production and the
construction of a sustainable future
The limit is the end-point from which life
is constructed. It is from death that we reorganise
our existence. The law of the limits
of nature has refounded the sciences and
the human world is sustained by the recognition
of its cultural and genetic limits in
the prohibition of incest. In the face of this
panorama of culture and knowledge of the
world, one should ask by which strange design
the economy has managed to bypass the
question of limits, as it attempts to rule the
Contours of Climate Justice. Ideas for shaping new climate and energy politics 105